Best Practices for Measuring Email Marketing Campaigns

Email marketing is a great way to stay in contact with your current and potential customer base. Many successful companies collect email addresses as a way to reach their target audience by sending valuable content and offers.

However, how do you know if your efforts are working?

The short answer: like all things digital, this data is measurable. So why not measure the effectiveness of your email marketing at every stage in the process? Just follow the steps in this easy-to-use-guide!

Driving Customers Toward Desired Outcomes

Before we begin, it’s important to identify the primary goal or goals of your email marketing efforts. Are you trying to convince your target audience to sign up for an upcoming webinar, purchase a product, or do something else entirely?

Once you’ve identified a primary goal or set of goals, think of all the different ways your audience might interact with you before they decide to take that desired action. Ask yourself: How do we drive the customer journey toward our desired outcomes?

In terms of email marketing campaigns, there are three key stages:

Entice readers to open your email with an appealing subject line

Offer content and messaging that gets them to click through to your website

Provide readers with a consistent message between the email and website experience, driving them to take that desired final action

Yes, it’s a lot to consider when preparing an effective email marketing campaign. But, trust us, putting this work in ahead of time will give you the best bang for your buck.

Measuring For Success

So, how do you determine whether or not your email marketing campaigns are actually achieving these outcomes and proving cost effective? To keep it simple, let’s break it down into three specific metrics that measure each desired activity outlined above:

Open Rate

Subject lines are one of the key factors that determine whether or not someone opens an email in the first place. This means that you want a subject line that’s short enough to fit in the space provided and long enough to give your target audience the information needed to compel them to open the email. The open rate metric helps you find this perfect balance by determining the effectiveness of your subject lines.

Click Through Rate

The content within your email is what determines whether or not someone is going to click the embedded links and get closer to your desired outcomes. So, it’s important to ask: Are you providing value to your customer with your email campaigns? Is the content being presented at the right time? Think about what your customer wants (useful information, a good value, etc.) and when that information will be most pertinent (such as a sale prior to the holidays).

Conversion Rate

Once the user lands on your website, more questions come into play: Are visitors provided with a message that is consistent with the email they received? Is navigating to their end goal seamless or might it be confusing on their end?

At this point in the process, you want to make it as easy as possible for your target audience to complete your desired outcome. So, if you want them to make a purchase, then the process to add a product to their cart, pay, and complete the checkout process should be very straightforward. Conversion rate gives you feedback on these on-page aspects.

How to Improve Performance

To determine what aspects of your email marketing campaigns are effective, try different marketing strategies at each stage of the process. Begin with the process closest to conversion, such as the landing page and customer experience navigating your website.

Make sure these actions are as streamlined as possible before optimizing your email content and subject lines with the overall customer journey in mind. You want to make the bottom of your funnel as efficient as possible before you begin improving activities that occur prior to actually visiting your website.

Goal-Oriented Measuring

There are a variety of factors that can impact the effectiveness of your email marketing strategy. That’s why we suggest measuring each stage to determine what needs to be optimized to most effectively drive your audience toward your end goal.